In 1968 US soldiers murdered several hundred Vietnamese civilians in the single most infamous incident of the Vietnam War. The My Lai massacre is often held to have been an aberration but investigative journalist Nick Turse has uncovered evidence that war crimes were committed by the US military on a far bigger scale.
In a war in which lip service was often paid to winning "hearts and minds", the US military had an almost singular focus on one defining measure of success in Vietnam: the body count - the number of enemy killed in action.
Vietnamese forces, outgunned by their adversaries, relied heavily on mines and other booby traps as well as sniper fire and ambushes. Their methods were to strike and immediately withdraw.
Unable to deal with an enemy that dictated the time and place of combat, US forces took to destroying whatever they could manage. If the Americans could kill more enemies - known as Viet Cong or VC - than the Vietnamese could replace, the thinking went, they would naturally give up the fight.
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